PJE's Booker Blog

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Marlon James wins 2015 Man Brraper Prize

So, in the end there was no need for any more brute-force
voting, the judges went out all guns blazing, and unanimously
awarded the £50,000 Man Booker Prize to the “very exciting, very violent, full
of swearing” A
Brief History of Seven Killings, and Marlon James has become the first Jamaican-born winner. At
686 pages, A Brief History of Seven Killings is also one of the longest winners, continuing the trend towards
hulking tomes – much to Salman Rushdie’s chagrin: "Just as I start writing
short books, long books are in. My days of long books are over" he told The
Telegraph last week.

Big names vying to be
snubbed in favour of “new
voices and younger writers" next year include: Julian Barnes, Don
DeLillo, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, and maybe even the long-awaited sequel to
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. There may even be a bit of Cauliflower®
in the Booker stew.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

IQvEQ?

There’s no point me making any predictions here,
because by the time anyone reads this post the result will have been announced.
(I’m afraid I lack the wherewithal to keep up with technology and was unable to
get online yesterday as the distant library computers I rely on were all down.)
Anyway what do I know? As usual I only got round to reading half the shortlist
- partly because I spent a lot of time wallowing in Iain Pears’ Arcadiainstead. (Very enjoyable, like Narnia for grown-ups, and
much better than The Bone Clocks.) I couldn't faultThe Fishermen - it deserves to be as
widely read and successful as The Kite Runner, but The
Year of the Runaways eluded me until last week, so I cannot offer
an opinion as to whether the mystery punter known as ‘Mr Smith‘ will be in
the money again this year. I suspect that those two are the sort of books that
end up on the shortlist because everyone agrees they are excellent, but without
them being the out-and-out favourite of any particular judge. Possible
compromise choices if the other four all prove too divisive.

I couldn’t face A Brief History of Seven
Killings, partly because of the small print (yes, I have reached that
age) but mostly because it has been compared to James Ellroy and Quentin
Tarantino. I remember one Christmas my local library (now an empty building)
wrapped up some books and handed them out to customers as an extra, mystery
loan. Trouble was, half of them were wrapped in blue paper and half in pink. It
wasn’t hard to imagine the type of books each colour concealed. I realised then
that any book that can be wrapped in blue or pink is of little interest to me.
I can’t help wondering if this year the judging process has been a little
fractious because, more than any previous year, the shortlist suggests a gender divide.

I suspect that Satin Island, for
example, must have had the determined backing of one male-brained judge for it
to get this far. It is interesting, but more semi-intellectual noodling than
novel in my opinion - a slight, superficial addition to Tom McCarthy's oeuvre.
Although it does sit nicely on the shortlist for The Goldsmith's Prize - the
increasingly impressive rival to the Booker - which prizes originality:
novelness, you might say. Their list also includes The Field of the Cloth
of Gold - the latest inscrutable treasure from Magnus Mills, Acts
of the Assassins by Richard Beard, Grief Is The Thing With
Feathers by Max Porter, Lurid & Cute by Adam
Thirlwell, and Kevin Barry's forthcoming Beatlebone.

Anyone wanting experimental fiction, and thinking Satin
Island is it, ought to venture back to the very first year of the Booker Prize
(1969) and seek out Nicholas Mosley's Impossible Object
which should have won then, and would have walked onto the shortlist any year
since. Two of the judges - including the renowned literary
critic Frank Kermode - favoured it, but were "silenced."

"I wanted to write you something
impossible," we are told
at the end, "like a staircase climbing a spiral to
come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back
overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions
but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The
object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates
reality."

Is reality the impossible object of fiction? He asks.
That’s way above my literary pay grade. (Which is zero.) I would like to refer you to a review by John_Self, but there doesn’t seem
to be one. We should all pester him to write one.

I was also surprised that A Spool of Blue Thread
made it to the shortlist. Indeed, on the day the longlist was announced I was
planning to take it back to the library, unfinished, because I didn’t expect it
to be on the list. It seemed to be a well-written, good-hearted family saga any
well-meaning librarian could happily wrap in pink, rather than literary
fiction. I wondered whether I might just as well visit Peyton
Place. I think I had been expecting something more like Carol
Shields who, sadly, never won the Booker Prize. She should have won in 2002
with Unless,
but the judges that year chose a lesser Canadian writer: Yann Martel. Life
of Pi, went on to become the biggest selling Booker Prize winner ever,
and recently received a Presidential
seal of approval from Barack Obama who read it with his daughter,
describing it as “a lovely book – an elegant proof of God, and the power of
storytelling." Nevertheless, the judges got it wrong. Unless,
the last novel Shields wrote before succumbing to cancer, is a book every woman
needs to read, and every man should be made to read. It also opens with the
wisest first paragraph I have ever read:

"It happens that I am going through a period
of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I've heard people speak of
finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never
understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations
of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people,
in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of
happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of
glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it,
and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life."

Talking of life...

Not since Owen
Meany has a character in American fiction had such an emotional
impact on readers as Jude St. Francis in A
Little Life - perhaps the strongest favourite for the Booker Prize since Wolf Hall. It has split people
like nothing since the death of Princess Diana. Perhaps for similar
psychological reasons.

Many readers have been deeply affected by it, but some
who felt obliged to read it because it was on the Booker shortlist seem to have
read it through gritted teeth. (Colette_Jones on The Mookse and the Gripes forum suggested that A Little Life was likely to win because “if it didn't annoy them the first and second times, they're not going to notice problems on a third reading.” Ouch.)

Last year I said that longlists suck, and I am even
more convinced this year. If the list of books entered for the prize were
published instead of the longlist, no-one in their right mind would try and
read all 150-plus novels. We would just read the ones that most appealed to us,
rather than trying to plough through a dozen books chosen by a literary
committee. No wonder some followers of the prize seem permanently disgruntled
by the judges' selections. In the end the judges are tasked with finding the best book of
the year, everything else is gravy. So scrap the longlist and give us the list
of submissions instead I say. (Don’t worry, I won’t hold my breath.)

I would be happy to see A Little Life
win, but it isn't the best candidate for the title of Great American Novel I've
read this year, or even for the title greatest American Gay Novel (as it has been labelled)
because back in January I read James Baldwin's Just
Above My Head (1979) – a book most people have never heard of (I
certainly hadn’t) which is shameful. One of the all-time great novelists at the
peak of his powers, as they say. Around the same time I heard Stephen Fry on
the radio show Just A Minute
attempting to list some Great American Novels. Disappointingly, he never got
beyond dead white men. Which should remind us to give some kudos to the Booker
Prize for promoting so much diverse, quality fiction for so many years.